Friday, May 24, 2013

Uhh…to give John Hart more face-time to mindlessly say “look” and “listen”?

Even more striking than the distribution, though, is the absolute level of talent. Three wins, a reasonable expectation for what this year’s Mets and Yankees first-rounders will do in their careers, is about the value a decent and unexceptional player like Daniel Murphy will have in a good year. It’s a really nice hot streak, a misplaced stroke in a ledger. It makes you appreciate just how rare high-end baseball talent is.

Most of the value of such draft picks comes from the fact that ballplayers who aren’t yet eligible for free agency are paid millions of dollars less than they’re actually worth, so that even a scrub can be a valuable asset. The rest comes from the small chance that the pick will deliver a player like McCutchen or Trammell. You could thus say that baseball’s draft combines the worst features of buying scratch-off lotto tickets and attending an accounting seminar while restricting the ability of young men to choose where they want to work into the bargain. It’s a great deal if you own a ballclub; for everyone else, not so much.

The final absurdity might be that if you wanted to spread the best talent around, getting rid of the draft would be a decent way to do it. The eight amateur free agents who were top MVP or Cy Young finishers last year originally signed with eight different teams. Only two, Adrian Beltre and Robinson Cano, signed with teams in rich markets. Allow players to work where they’d like and some will go for the glamor teams, but some will go for the ones where they have the best chance to play, or to the towns with the best weather, or the ones closest to home.

Open markets in talent work just fine in technology, law and soccer, and they’d work just as well for baseball if anyone would give them a chance.

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Agree with post 1. Just because players later in the draft happen to do well, it doesn't mean that it's a random process. As a general rule, early picks do better than later picks, this is indicative that for the most part, scouting does a good job of identifying who will make it to the majors. If you don't have the draft, then payroll willingness will be the major determination on who gets the best players. It would continue the rich getting richer concept.

I personally love MLB's structure(yes it could be tweaked of course, but I like how it works for the most part.)

What would happen if players were all free-agents upon turning professional, and there was no cap on individual contracts or team spending on amateur signings, but players were given rankings by an independent panel of scouts, retired executives, and so forth, and each team was allowed to sign only so many players of each rank? The Yankees, Dodgers, and other huge spending teams would probably sign all the players who currently go in the top 10, but after that it would be a talent crapshoot, and it might reduce the cost of later first-round talent as compared to second and third-round talent, because there wouldn't be the artificial distinction of higher draft status to drive the demands--that is, it would be clearer even to the teams that the difference in likely outcome between the 30th overall pick and the 60th overall pick is negligible.

I can see an argument for having only the first round or maybe even the first half of the first round (non-playoff teams). But without the draft, Harper, Strasburg, the Uptons, etc. end up on the big market teams year after year after year. The draft is almost certainly the most successful tool for competitive balance.

I will grant it doesn't make competitive balance sense to have the draft for N America and the free-for-all for Latin America.

Now, of course the same logic applies to "why have all those cheap years at the front of their career", "why wait 6 years for them to become FA", etc.

The draft, in all its various configurations, is NOT about competive balance. It's all about depressing the cost of labor.

Yes, but it also does a good job of promoting competitive balance.

It's really about both. Believe it or not small market owners do in fact want to win here and there just like the large market teams, and in an open bidding war clearly would be at a massive disadvantage.

One sign of this randomness is the way expected returns flatten out through the draft. This year, the Mets, who were lousy last year, have the 11th overall pick, while the Yankees, who were very good, have the 26th. If the draft worked as it's supposed to, you'd expect that the Mets' pick would be substantially more valuable, based on historical data.

That isn't even close to being true, though. Players picked 11th overall between 1965 and 2005 (those picked since haven't necessarily had an opportunity to show what they can do in the majors) have been worth an average of 2.93 "wins" over the course of their careers, according to Baseball-Reference.com. Those picked 26th have been worth an average of 3.02.

The earlier picks were at least a bit more likely to make the majors—28 did so, as opposed to 20 of those picked later—but they weren't any more likely to be really useful. (Four of them were worth at least 15 wins in their careers, while three of the later picks did.) The best player taken in either spot, the great Detroit shortstop Alan Trammell, was a 26th overall pick, and he was worth more by himself than the three best 11th picks combined. That will change before long, given that Pittsburgh's Andrew McCutchen, who was taken 11th, is just at the start of his prime, but still.

Using averages rather distorts this comparison and, as noted, will soon anyway undermine the author's argument.

(Separately, draftees' careers are part the availability of raw talent and part organizational evaluation and development of raw talent. Looking at drafts by slot does not control for organization impact.)

http://www.baseball-reference.com/draft/?overall_pick=11&

11th Picks Overall in the MLB June Amateur Draft
49 matching player(s). 31 played in the majors (63%). Total of 133.9 WAR, or 4.3 per major leaguer.

Easier way would be this:
1. Every team has $5 000 000 budget.
2. Every position is worth $ 150 000 (so WS winner has $5 150 000, and Houston $9 500 000).
3. Signings start 1. July.
4. All players eligible for draft or international signing are eligible.
5. Bonuses of less than $100 000 are free.
6. FA compensation means transferring $1 000 000 from player's new to his previous team - slightly bad teams (those just outside worst ten) aren't hardest hit anymore.
7. Since PA wouldn't like hard cap, 75% tax on going over up to 5%, 150% tax on going over 5 - 10%, 200% tax + reduction of next year's budget by full amount over for everything over 10%. Tax goes up 50% for every 10% of budget over allowed.

Every player can sign with team he likes, bad teams have better chance to add impact talent and teams with good scouting can add as many sub-$100 000 players as they want.

I realize that today the draft is "legal" since it was negotiated as part of the collective bargaining agreement. But what about the very first draft back in 1965? Why was that "legal"?

I don't know that much about baseball's legal issues -- was that draft also "agreed to" by the players in some way (I thought Marvin Miller negotiated baseball's very first collective bargaining agreement in the late 1960s)?

The draft, in all its various configurations, is NOT about competive balance. It's all about depressing the cost of labor

It's always been about a little of both, because the clubs don't share monolithic interests. An interesting history of the draft notes that the 1964-65 draft initiative was meant to curb bonuses, but of course that meant that some teams were trying to curb bonuses paid by others. (The vote was unilateral by the clubs, to answer #13, and initially opposed by both New York clubs, the Dodgers, and the Cardinals, though eventually it seems that the Cardinals were the only diehard on the issue and were outvoted 19-1.)

If competitive balance was a mere byproduct of the limitation of bonuses, it still worked pretty well, at least until major-league free-agency complicated the process further. It seemed natural, when I was in high school, that Baltimore, Oakland, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati should be dominant franchises; but that's quite an anomaly in baseball history as a whole.